1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to manipulation and selection of menu entries and icons using interactive manipulation of graphics images and, more particularly, to arrangements providing increased visibility and ease of selection of icons and menu entries without compromising cursor response.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the field of computers and data processors, it has long been recognized that the capability of a user to receive and assimilate information in order to interact easily with the computer is of major importance in the usefulness of the computer in many applications. The utility of increased "computing power" to execute programs at ever increasing speeds diminishes in all but a relatively few highly complex programs which require only slight interactivity with a user when the user cannot readily perceive, understand and react to the results thereof. Therefore, the interest in and dedication of a significant fraction of available computing power to the user interface has become a widely accepted practice for both hardware and software design in the data processing field. In recent years, it has also been found that displayed graphics images, especially if manipulable by the user provide a particularly good medium for both the communication of information to the user including processor and program execution status and for the input of user control information and data, particularly users suffering disabilities or handicaps. Arrangements utilizing various techniques to provide bi-directional communication between processor and user through display manipulation are often collectively referred to as graphical user interfaces.
Input of control signals and data through the medium of a graphic display requires the use of a device by which a location on the display may be specified, together with a mechanism for selection of that location in order to select an object, such as an icon or displayed data, associated with that location. This requirement, in turn, requires some arrangement to provide visual feedback to the user, commonly by display of a cursor, pointer or the like so that the operator can control the specification of a location without inputting of data or exercising control until the location is correctly specified.
Increased interactivity of the user and data processor also increases the number of control and/or data options which must be displayed to the operator at any given time. In the past, large numbers of control options were grouped by category and the categories listed as a menu of only one or a few text lines on the screen; individual options being found by accessing an individual item in that menu to access one or more further menus, generally arranged in a hierarchical fashion, to find the desired option. A particularly successful form of this arrangement is generally referred to as a pull-down menu. Nevertheless, such a hierarchical selection process consumes substantial user and processor time and assumes that the operator is highly familiar with the application program in order to accurately select a category in which a desired option is to be found without laborious searching or browsing through successive menus.
Presently, it is considered desirable to provide as many options as possible on a single menu displayed on the display screen in order to more fully inform the operator of the options available for control and to avoid the multiple selections required for operation of successive hierarchical pull-down menus. At the same time, however, an increased number of selectable options presented on the display screen consume a substantial portion of the screen display space and would interfere with display of, for example, a document unless the area allocated to each selectable item is limited; implying small displayed size of the menu item or icon. Such area limitation is facilitated by use of graphical legends, generally referred to as icons, which use standard images rendered on small standardized areas rather than alphanumeric legends which may require variable size fields. However, the small size of icons when many options are available increases the accuracy with which a location must be specified for correct selection as well as reducing visibility to the operator and the difficulty of maintaining the cursor at that location during selection.
While some advances in improving immunity to modification of specified position during selection has been achieved, such as in copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/340,935, filed Nov. 17, 1994, the only improvement toward ease of operator selection with a cursor has been in the provision of a so-called gravity well around each selectable icon or menu item. (An icon is a special case of a menu item only to the extent that a graphic image may be implied. As used hereinafter, the term "icon" is to be understood to be generic to any form of menu item. ) Little, if any development has been directed to improvement of icon visibility or to aid recognition by a user.
The "gravity well" approach comprises the provision of position comparison between an icon location and cursor position to provide cursor stability at a selection point within the icon and to provide a degree of "attraction" of the cursor to the nearest icon or menu selection, usually by weighting increments of cursor movement specified by the operator to develop a preferential direction of cursor movement toward the nearest menu item. Unfortunately, while such an arrangement reduces positional errors during selection, linearity of cursor response is inherently compromised by the implementation of such an arrangement. For example, if a plurality of icons or menu selections are placed adjacent to each other, a substantial amount of actuation of a graphic input device may be necessary to move a cursor away from a selection position of enhanced stability due to the gravity well. Therefore, if a cursor is positioned on an icon, the amount of movement of a graphical input device necessary to move the cursor away from that icon toward the desired icon may cause overshoot of the desired icon to another icon which the operator does not wish to select. Correction then becomes equally difficult since the cursor again becomes trapped in the gravity well of another undesired icon.
Additionally, when a large number of icons are presented on an acceptably small portion of the screen area, visibility of the individual icons and the ability of the user to recognize the identity of individual icons is severely compromised. This is especially true where overall available display area or resolution is limited such as in portable and notebook computers, many of which have adequate processing power to support multitasking which is preferably implemented with display of plural overlaid windows, each window necessarily being of smaller size than the screen. The use of such windows further reduces the display area available to a particular application since the edges of overlaid windows must also be displayed to the operator to indicate processor and application status.
Additionally, many applications contain procedures and sub-routines which require user intervention; either of a mandatory nature (e.g. requiring an acknowledgement or confirmation of a command, input of a print command or a correction of input data) or selection between a limited subset of menu items. In some applications, the user is informed of the requirement for user intervention by the automatic display of a so-called text balloon, help window or special purpose menu. However, such procedures or routines may be entered unexpectedly and these types of display images require substantial display area and may obscure the portion of the display screen which the user needs to see in order to make the required decision and appropriate input to the system.
As an alternative which avoids such consumption of display area, it is also known in such instances to call the operator's attention to particular menu choices or mandatory required inputs by altering the visual attributes of icons or menu items, such as by blinking, change of color or increasing display brightness or intensity of particular displayed items. However, when the icon or menu item is already displayed at small size, change of display attributes does not enhance and generally degrades recognition of icon or menu item identity by a user. Further, blinking or intensity change of a very small area of the display is often not immediately evident to a user and does not immediately convey the need for an input or selection. This latter problem is particularly characteristic of some display media, such as liquid crystal displays in which the gamut of available visual image values is limited in intensity range. In any case, the alteration of visual attributes of a menu item such as an icon is necessarily displayed in an area which is displaced from the location on the display where current input data is displayed and the change of visual attributes must, at best, be detected by the peripheral vision of the user.
Accordingly, it is seen that currently known display enhancement techniques are not well-suited to a very large number of commonly encountered conditions where communication between a user and data processing system are required. While some attempts have been made to automatically evaluate the display and to modify the display enhancement, such as providing for variable location of help windows or switching between display enhancement modes, none have been fully successful in resolving trade-offs between required screen area and low visibility and/or user recognition in order to significantly improve the efficiency of communication through the graphic user interface.
All of the above problems are increased in severity for users of data processing equipment who may have some degree of visual impairment. In particular, the number of users of computers, particularly of the portable or notebook type who are of an age at which some loss of focal accommodation is to be expected has greatly increased in recent years. Therefore, when the displayed size of icons or menu items is reduced, particularly at a fixed display resolution, recognition of the identity of icons and menu items becomes particularly difficult and slow for such users. While some arrangements have been proposed to display images at increased size, such as fractional windows which cover less than the full page size or width of a document, no arrangements are known for enhancement of menus as a visual aid for such users. Further, fractional windows are not generally satisfactory due to the changes (usually abrupt shifts) of position of the document under the fractional window and general functional incompatibility with the goals answered by overlaid windows in multi-tasking environments, as discussed above.